I don’t like sleep training. And what I really mean by that is I don’t like the cry it out method and baby sleeping far from me. I’m a responsive parent who also suffered from post natal anxiety so bad I set 5 minute timers on my phone and checked on Polly routinely the rare few times she didn’t nap directly on my chest. I was so afraid of her dying of SIDS that I was paralyzed by fear of her sleeping out of my sight and from the moment she was born she didn’t like sleeping anywhere but on me. Even in the hospital she cried when she was in the bassinet but would hush in an instant and sleep like a dream if I held her.
The world will tell you that that’s manipulation or that they need to learn sleep independence as soon as they’re four months. But even as she slept on my chest at home when four months rolled around I couldn’t do it. She would occasionally sleep for 45 minute chunks in the bassinet but afterwards she wanted me and I fell asleep nursing her. Honestly, it was easy that way. I could sleep and she slept. No fussing, no crying. No me having to soothe her at 3:00 AM and crawl back into bed and pray she slept.
I researched safe bedsharing and we do that. I’m a light sleeper who doesn’t move when asleep so it works pretty well for us. It’s not for every family and that’s okay, in parenthood there is no one size fits all approach and you have to do what you feel is best for your baby and yourself.
All in all, Polly’s sleep was great after we got the bedsharing thing down. Then the four month sleep regression hit us like a ton of bricks.
Suddenly she fought naps, and though she would be sleepy it would take an hour for her to actually fall asleep. I was dumb struck. I would get so mad, because it was 11:00 at night at my baby was still fighting sleep and I had been bouncing on a yoga ball for an hour to no avail. I was exhausted and she was too. There were nights she would fuss as I tried to bounce her and I would weep right along with her.
I feel like it’s always at night when I have really mean thoughts. I’m sure being chronically sleep deprived doesn’t help feelings of self hatred and the intense longing for the baby stage to be over and to concrete wall up my womb and put a sign in front of it that says no trespassing so I never had to go through that again. I don’t like those thoughts, cause I do want more kids. It’s just a lot of work, but it doesn’t last forever.
The four month sleep regression lasted about a month. We finally got over it and I was so thankful.
Then she turned six months and we had a regression that lasted for about three weeks.
Then, just as she mastered crawling and I thought surely we were done, the 8-9-10 month sleep regression hit and this time I thought I would die.
My child went from sleeping from 8:00 pm to 8:00 am to being sleepy at 8:00 but fighting it till 11:00. There were nights that after my back ached from bouncing on that confounded yoga ball and my nipples felt like I was nursing a newborn again I gave up and let her play downstairs with the lights on dim for however long it took me to get her good and sleepy. Sometimes it took thirty minutes, sometimes it took an hour. Occasionally she would wake up at 12:00 and refuse to nurse back to sleep so we’d get up and go play again. The stairs got stomped down a lot of times, because I was so exhausted and so at the end of my rope. I’d sit her down on the floor and she would beam up at me like I hung the moon and all that frustration would vanish because, gosh, I just love her so much. Who even needs sleep?
They call it the 8-9-10 month sleep regression because it usually strikes when the baby learns to crawl and really masters it and since every baby gets to that milestone at different ages, the sleep regression that sometimes follows can come anywhere in that three month period. Polly learned to crawl the week she before she turned 9 months and it has lasted almost the entire month. She’ll be 10 months on the 22nd. I feel like she is getting back into her old routine. She at least is starting to go to sleep at 8:00 and sleeping better during the night pretty consistently. She has to be bounced to sleep and most of the time bounced and fed to go to sleep. I’m hoping that as the weeks wear on she will fully go back to just needing to be bounced or nursed to sleep (but not both at the time time) and then sleep better for her naps like she used to.
And, honestly, I also pray that the next baby will be a lot more easy going when it comes to sleep. Maybe I’ll look into the Taking Cara Babies class because it does not include you letting them cry at any point and that’s really all I want out of life. Non-traumatizing sleep for all. 😴
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